I’ve Been Alive for 10,000 Days

240,000+ hours of life — what have I learned?

In Malcom Gladwell’s Outliers, he speaks of spending 10,000 hours on a chosen craft in order to be considered an expert. If this is the case and I’ve spent 1 hour each day for the past 10,000 days being myself, I should theoretically, according to Gladwell, be an expert on me.

Except I’m not.

Today, May 5th marks the 10,000th day I’ve been alive. That’s 240,000 hours of life as the clock strikes midnight. Since this day also falls on Cinco de Mayo, I think my parents intended for me to celebrate my life to the fullest and be present. I was their gift, and I hope that so long as I live, I can pass on that gift to the world I live in.

I hadn’t always paid attention to when I was going to turn 10,000 days old. This is a number that no one really cares about, since as humans we are more privy to anniversaries and birthdays. For me, it’s a number that only came up recently as I was looking back at my life so far and realizing that I am not the same person that I was when I turned 20 (I am 27 now). When looking at the number 10,000, I also realized just how sacred it could be because for many of us, it happens just 2–3 times in our lives. For those of us who eat our veggies, get our exercise, and sleep 8 hours, we might experience the milestone 4 times, and with each milestone comes a lifetime of lessons.

Consider the following:

At 10,000 days, you are just coming into your own or figuring it out. 27 is not quite 20, and not quite 30 either. College and/or graduate school is still in play for some, and for others it’s the struggle to enter a workforce asymmetric with our education. For others, marriage just happened and kids are on the way, while still for others, it’s a time of growth and going through a constant question of meaning in our “quarter-life crisis”. To borrow a line from The Pursuit of Happyness and Chris Gardner’s identification of life themes, we’ll call this chapter of life, Growth.

At 20,000 days, you are now entering your mid-50s. I haven’t of course, claimed to live into my 50s but the ones I’ve observed include children, a family, a home, and a career that has come into its own. At this moment, we haven’t thought about legacy either, but it’s starting to make its way onto the radar of life. By now, college and high school reunions do become the reminiscing festivals we imagined to be when we were young and unfortunately, some of the people we once knew aren’t showing up anymore, and it’s not because the invitation got lost.

At 30,000 days, you’re entering your 80s, an era I have yet to live in. For those I have observed in their 80s, it’s a time of cementing a legacy, whether it’s passing on knowledge, taking care of grand kids, thinking about a life well-lived, and growing old with someone a la the movie “Up”. At this age point, we are so lucky to have lived so long and seen so much. If we’re even luckier, the universe tacks on another lets us live to 40,000 days at which point, we will be a ripe 108. For millennials, this age seems so far away — and it is (as we could talking about an era of true flying cars, automated everything, and who knows what else), but many I know have already begun the thought process of what their legacy means. I hope you have too.

Will all of that happen? Given the first 27 years of my life, I’m not betting any money — anything and everything can change on a dime. The fundamentals however, I hope will remain the same.

When I first realized I was reaching 10,000 days of my life, I thought about writing a book about the many lessons I’ve learned. There’s the piece about never forgetting breakfast, or that you simply can’t make everyone happy, or even the bit about working towards happiness as a destination. As I wrote these out one by one, I realized that maybe a book wasn’t the best idea, since after all, we all live through a different journey of life. Though the fundamentals for all tend to be the same, the path at which we arrive at those fundamentals are different, and so we must understand that the paths of each are sacred.

So what are the biggest lessons that I’ve found that are important through my 10,000 days of life? For me, I think there have been three. One of them I’m slowly beginning to understand a lot better, another is a growth in process, and the final one is the ultimate one:

Be grateful — for your struggles help you write your story, but do not define it. For your present is not your past, and for your present is not your future. All of the things that happen to you, the people you meet, the things you do, and the choices you make happen for a reason. To forget to practice gratitude is to forget the essence of what makes your life and everyone else’s the present that you are to the world.

The thing that has stood out to me so far is that what you imagine to happen, usually doesn’t. The 20-year old in me would peer at my 27-year old self now and be utterly afraid of what’s to come because he wanted a life of stability and “normalcy”, which was a wife, kids, house, 2.5 cars, and a white picket fence — absent of any entrepreneurship whatsoever, while the 27-year self now wonders back at why his 20-year old self wanted to be so boring. It’s easy to make fun of what we once thought and be embarassed by it — who hasn’t? However, the better path to take here is to simply acknowledge that you did think like that once, and it’s not a bad thing. It’s simply the best thing you knew back then. As a good friend of mine told me last night as we were both reflecting:

Do your best — and when you can do better — do that.

Be yourself — that even though we’ve spent 10,000 days alive, that many of us are still in the process of self discovery, and that such activity is one of the most cherished, time-honored things we can be. I remember how tortured high school was because sometimes being yourself seems like it could have been the worst thing you could have done. But as we grow, we learn to know that the only thing we can be, is be ourselves, because if we aren’t we simply aren’t being honest with ourselves. I and many of our peers have spent a great deal of time beating ourselves up over everything — small mistakes, little things. If we thought about the actual physical punishment that mental punishment gave us, perhaps we would think differently.

And finally,

Be — As someone who works on the border of marketing and high tech, this is difficult. I’ve been accused — and justifiably so — for staring into my phone and staring off into space, but the happiest moments for me in this short life so far have been when I was the most present, the most aware, and the most of the two lessons before this. Happiness is not a destination, but a state of being that is achieved as early and often as possible.

So at 10,000 days, I find myself having grown this far. In my next 10,000, I hope to gain more insight, live a little more of life, and become even more of the person I hope to be.

Bottoms up, friends!